On Impartiality

When the wise man points at the Moon, the fool looks at the finger. And I’m afraid there are quite a lot of examples of this problem in the response to my posting about the BBC.  Various people on Twitter, including Mehdi Hasan, the presenter of the programme for which the BBC apologised, have discounted what I say as some sort of complaint about my treatment. I have to say that Mr Hasan’s hostile tone on ‘Twitter’ is itself interesting.

 

These critics are much like the cyclists in Kensington gardens who, when I ask them politely not to ride their machines on footpaths clearly marked with signs saying ‘No Cycling’ in letters ten inches high, respond with the words ‘Get a Life!’.  They seem to think that this is a devastating riposte. As it happens, and I thank providence for it, my life has been much blessed, and may possibly have been as satisfying and enjoyable as the ones those cyclists lead. The point remains, these cyclists are doing something wrong, and the fault is in them, not in me for pointing it out to them.

 

It is of course perfectly possible that I do sometimes indulge in self-pity. Most people do.  And I can’t say I positively enjoy the individual insults about my character,  appearance, etc, which are bestowed upon me by the Twitter Mob and the ‘Comment is Free’ mob. Though I do take a general pleasure in being the target of such fury, from such people.

 

And I would certainly like to do more broadcasting for BBC Radio Four, the most important speech channel in this country by a mile, and one I listen to a lot, which reaches an audience I very much wish to reach. I’d even be glad of the chance to do more TV presenting. It may be that I’d be no good at it. Certainly, if my voice really is as portrayed on ‘What the Papers Say’,  it would be unreasonable to expect much radio work.  Even the wit of Bernard Shaw or the eloquence of Demosthenes would sound pretty terrible in *that* voice. By the way, as my recording of the programme was supplied by the BBC, I believe it is their copyright and I have no lawful right to put it on the Internet myself.

 

But even if this is so,  the real point remains the one of impartiality . Did the BBC fail to show due impartiality on ‘What the Papers Say’?

 

Rather than deal with this, my enemies will drag up almost any other subject.  One Twitter critic said that a BBC run by me would be like the Taleban. This is a common misconception of defenders of the current left consensus. They think that conservatives want some sort of Fox TV, in which blatant rightist propaganda is woven into every paragraph, and everyone sucks up to ‘right-wing’ politicians.

 

Nothing could be more wrong. I have for years advocated what I call ‘adversarial broadcasting’ in which all presenters would openly acknowledge their bias, instead of pretending they had none, and in which every major current affairs programme would always be double-headed – presented by two people of opposing views so that nobody was ever interviewed by a friend, and so that any assumptions peddled by one side could be challenged on air, at the time,  by the other. The BBC’s current strong bias towards intervention in Syria, for instance, could not have survived such a system.

 

This would require the abandonment of the concept of the ‘centre’. This involves  the arrogation to themselves of automatic, unchallengeable rectitude,  by an elite sharing a consensus. That consensus is from then on permanently shielded from attack or criticism, because those outside the ‘centre’ are - automatically - either wholly excluded, or allowed to broadcast only under strict conditions ( as I am). These special conditions (always on the end seat, asked questions beginning 'are you seriously suggesting that...?', denied the last word, compelled to raise their voices to get a hearing, etc etc etc,  mark them out as dissenters whose main purpose is to provoke entertaining debate, but who are not fundamentally a serious part of the national discussion. The existing system of the approved ‘centre’ can and does coexist with a formal ‘impartiality’ between the political parties, which can be demonstrated to be more or less working at any time when the general bias of the system is attacked.

 

Of course, it doesn’t work if any party strays too far from the anointed  ‘centre’ in which case the BBC is openly hostile, as it was to the Tories in the Thatcher era, and especially during the Hague and IDS periods. Litmus tests for membership of the ‘centre’ are attitudes on the European Union, on immigration, on public spending, on crime and punishment and on education. Increasingly the sexual revolution and drugs are part of this test as well.

 

Anyone who has ever invited me to speak to a public meeting will know that I always say I would much prefer to debate with an opponent. Having experienced so much unfairness in debates, I am keenly aware of what fairness ought to look like, and rather keen on it as a concept and a practical duty. How can you win – or lose – an argument that has not been fairly conducted?

 

I recently chaired a debate on same-sex marriage, posted here a few weeks ago, and I would challenge anyone to show that I did so in a partial manner, though one of the debaters was a friend of mine whose view was also much closer to my own than his opponent’s.

 

When the then Talk Radio asked me to present a weekly radio programme on current affairs, I suggested that it should be double-headed, and that my co-presenter should disagree with me on the whole moral, cultural social and political spectrum. I still think it was  a very entertaining and interesting programme, and I miss it every week.

 

Various people have said that the BBC has some conservative presenters. Well, one can argue about the politics of, say, Andrew Neil or Jeremy Clarkson. But even if, for the sake of argument, I accepted that they were conservative in my understanding of the term,  that still makes just two out of scores of BBC presenters whose true views it is not very hard to ascertain from their known tastes, interests, their tones of voice, their manner of questioning, their decisions on who gets the last word, and so on.

 

I once asked Mark Thompson, when he was Director-General,  if he could think of a single BBC presenter who could give a hard time to Clive Stafford Smith, the noted campaigner against the death penalty, and he was stumped.

 

I don’t think he should have been. The BBC should draw from a much wider pool of people for its presenters. But it won’t, until it understands that it is biased, and how it is biased. That is why I pursued this case - because it was a rare instance of an objectively measurable action which explained and exposed the nature of that bias. True, the BBC recognised that they had done something wrong. But they sought to rob it of any significance by insisting that it was a ‘mistake’, not requiring any deeper explanation.  I’ll let you know if anything else happens.